Monthly Archives: October 2010

Come Monday, It’ll be a month since i left KL. I’ve gone to all the interviews that was pencilled into my schedule. What i’ve set out to do, is not done. I can’t secure an employer willing to sponsor my work visa. Day in day out i tell myself to be positive to believe that it will happen for me but its just been hard to keep up a smile when your heart is breaking. Especially today. When everything around me is grey and wet.

It’s very frustrating when your obstacle is an effin piece of paper. Yes they like my work. They like the way i think. They like that i have multiple skills but its just not enough. They tell me there are ways to go about this, which i appreciate but the ways aren’t instant, not right now. For some i might sound absolutely ungrateful. Some people would kill to have the same opportunity as me. To be here and to take the experience in. I guess i broke my little rule of hoping. I hoped that when i got here, i’d be lucky.

But its as they say, it never always goes the way you planned. So now, its time to regroup and rethink the strategy. What sort of solution i can come up for my dilemma? I have a month to make an impression on this agency. Proof my worth and that i exist. I am no little typical little asian. I refuse to be average. I’ve gone through PLAN A,B & C i have 23 other letters to go through…now to buck down for the last 4 weeks.

There are times, i’d want the day to just past real fast and i’d just be at the airport waiting for my flight to take me home. There are days, i’d be walking out in the city or be sitting at the park and i’d fall in love all over again. I feel completely revived and filled with ideas. Driven to make an impact. Then i get back to my apartment, i lose my spark. I wish at this moment i could just be and i’d have a lot more time to straighten this out.

Selling oneself and trying to find a solution to your dilemma can be a momentous task. All i need right now, is to be consistently inspired. To figure out, what about me that would want them to hire me? What makes me stand out? Got to think big now.

A little write up from a book im currently reading and would like to share.

” Identify what irritates you.

Linus Trovald, the invetor of Linux, says the following in his book: Just for Fun. “what got me interested in operating system: I bought a floppy controller so i wouldn’t have to use the microdrives, but the driver that came with the floppy controller was bad so i ended up writing my own. In the process of writing that i found some bugs in the operating system – or at least a discrepancy between what the documentation said the operating system would do and what it actually did. I found it because something i had written didn’t work.

My code was always, um perfect. So i knew it had to be something else, and i went in and disassembled the operating system.”

This is how the Linux operating system was born. A success story that just goes to prove that it is a good idea to search for solutions to things that bug you.

This is harder than you imagine, however. We humans have a tendency to think that the status quo is relatively good. At the same time, we get annoyed about things because we believe that it is how they must be, instead of identifying what bugs us and finding a solution. Only a few years ago, we were all annoyed because the banks shut at three. Now we are irritated because we have to enter a long security code when we stay up late on a Thursday night to pay our bills over the Internet.

When the bank succeed in solving this problem, what else will we find to get angry about?

Where ever there is a group of disgruntled people, there is a market for a new product or service. Unfortunately, however we are all too seldom aware of the fact that we have a problem. On the arrival of the answering machine, many of us wondered how we had managed before. Then number presentation came along and we, once again, wondered how we had managed without it. The advent of the mobile phone made us wonder how we had survived with only a land line. As soon as we began to send SMS messages, we realized that it solved a problem we did not know we had – and so on.

With hindsight, it is easy to see that many of these services could have been launched years earlier if we had only realized how much less frustrated we would feel. Which pent-up irritation will we solve next?

ACTIVITY

Write down 10 things that bug you. Write down the 10 most common complaints about your product or service. Try to come up with an improvement that not only solves your irritating problem, but which also makes your services that little bit better.”

Finally the official write up post landing. Here i am in Melbourne. 2 weeks in and nothing much to show for in the work category that is. I’ve been wanting to come here for the past 2 years. After visiting an old college buddy in 2008, i just fell completely for the city and made it my mission for the year after to try and come back and some how score a job in the advertising industry.

My process towards achieving that has been gruelling. With endless trips to the Australian High Commission appealing for a working visa has now lead me here trying to nail a proper job in the industry with an employer willing to sponsor my visa.

I’ve manage to score few interviews and i’ve went to 3 in the past 2 weeks. I haven’t been on an interview in ages. 6 + years to be exact. Let me tell you, it surely is a humbling experience. You get people liking your work so much but ended up saying no because they’re not in a position to sponsor you or your work is too commercial and it doesn’t fit their criteria or you’d get some mean old witch on a personal vendetta to demoralize you and your work. But you can’t let it get to you. It’s hard believe me to not break down but time is not on my side.

Realistically, i’ve given myself 6 weeks or so to sort this out. That’s the deadline. It’s that or my money runs out. Not too worried about scoring some freelance work here and there but would it be enough to sustain me and would it disrupt my actual work? Groceries here are cheap if you shop at the market it’s the accommodation that’s costly. As for now, i’m staying with a friend but it hasn’t been a walk in the park for the two of us. This would truly test our friendship and at times it worries me. With a lot of odds against me, i have to lock down and keep focus.

The next plan, is to do up a ‘guerilla attack’ and deliver mini packet portfolio to chosen agencies for their Creative Director’s perusal. Hopefully, they’d see the effort and be intrigued enough to want to call me in for a talk. Here goes nothing.